Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thanks for being here.
I want to bring up another issue. I was listening to Brian and Len talk about some of the challenges the apple and tender fruit industries are facing. When I think of those products, I think of the Niagara area, maybe Northumberland County up in the Meaford or Collingwood area. We're talking about business risk management, and I would think one of the risks--or one of the threats, actually--to your industry has to be property values. If someone is an apple producer and is going out of business, the apple producer down the road is competing to buy that land with somebody who wants to build a golf course. In Northumberland there is a lot of pressure.
I'm from the Lindsay area, and I know it is an issue there. As property values go up, you're competing with the lawyer from Toronto who wants to buy a weekend home with a nice old Ontario farmhouse on it. That's a challenge.
I'd like to throw this open to whoever wants to comment. First, just in terms of staying in the farm business, staying in agriculture, is increasing land value in southern Ontario a significant threat, and do you have any ideas in terms of what we can do at a policy level to try to keep acres in production, so that a lot of this valuable farmland doesn't become more and more subdivisions, which is what we've seen?